The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Leelee Sobieski. Show all posts

Saturday, 30 September 2023

Movie Review: Joy Ride (2001)

Genre: Thriller

Director: John Dahl

Starring: Steve Zahn, Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski

Running Time: 97 minutes

Synopsis: California-based college student Lewis (Paul Walker) embarks on a drive to Denver to reconnect with his childhood crush and maybe girlfriend Venna (Leelee Sobieski). He detours to Salt Lake City and bails out his always-in-trouble older brother Fuller (Steve Zahn). The brothers then use a CB radio to pull a cruel prank on truck driver "Rusty Nail", which ends with one man in hospital. Lewis and Fuller admit their role in the debacle and continue their journey, but Rusty Nail has revenge on his mind, and Venna becomes a target.

What Works Well: Co-written by J.J. Abrams, this variation on Duel offers a few touches of humour, some effective shocks, a polished visual style making best use of a monstrous evil truck, and a willing cast. The contrast between brothers - Lewis serious, Fuller a restless man-child - generates engaging interplay, and the endless open road at night paves the way for a few effective moments of peril.

What Does Not Work As Well: The antagonist (voiced by Ted Levine) remains an undefined across-the-radio presence, and most of the plot details fail the basic scrutiny test.

Conclusion: Despite a clunky load, roars down the highway with some style.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Friday, 27 November 2020

Movie Review: The Glass House (2001)

A suspense drama with gaslighting elements, The Glass House repeatedly threatens to become quite good without ever delivering.

In Los Angeles, 16 year old Ruby Baker (Leelee Sobieski) and her younger brother Rhett are orphaned when a car crash claims their parents. Family lawyer Alvin Begleiter (Bruce Dern) advises Ruby she stands to inherit a large estate once she achieves adulthood. In the meantime he arranges for the children to live with Terry and Erin Glass (Stellan Skarsgård and Diane Lane), former neighbours of the Bakers who have now moved into a swish Malibu villa.

The Bakers act friendly and appear wealthy, but Ruby soon notices creepy behaviour. She and Rhett are assigned a single bedroom, Terry's behaviour towards Ruby borders on lustful, and Erin may be a drug addict. Terry's car leasing business is in financial trouble, and Ruby starts to suspect Terry is more interested in her inheritance than her well-being. She turns to Begleiter and social worker Nancy Ryan (Kathy Baker) for help, but untangling Terry's intentions will be risky.

While woman-in-distress dramas are common, The Glass House adds a twist by applying the threat to a newly-orphaned 16 year old. Not quite an adult but already quite astute, Ruby is still learning to trust her instincts, and in the hands of a doleful Leelee Sobieski she is a complex protagonist defying both victim and hero stereotypes, and the best thing about the film.

Director Daniel Sackheim is more at home in television, and here never quite settles on a tone for Wesley Strick's script. The mood erratically oscillates between routine family adaptation travails, something-is-not-quite-right suspicion, and outright suspense before jumping to violence and carnage in the final act. All the shadings are handled with decent proficiency but the whole rarely gels into an effective package.

Sackheim does deliver some polished visuals. The Glass villa is a modern artwork of - what else - glass, and the scarcity of opaque walls compromises essential hiding places. The coastal highways around Malibu provide the snaky asphalt for plenty of sleek driving misadventures.

Apart from Ruby, the other characters are routine. Stellan Skarsgård is an effective wolf, but loses his sheep's clothing early. Diane Lane is confined to one of her much less interesting roles as Erin, while Bruce Dern is underused. Rita Wilson, Michael O'Keefe and Chris Noth have small roles.

The Glass House is never polished enough to fully shine, but it does occasionally glisten.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Saturday, 18 February 2017

Movie Review: Here On Earth (2000)

A stultifyingly atrocious teen romantic triangle drama, Here On Earth is a stinking miracle of rehashed ideas mixed with bad writing and lousy acting.

Rich teenager Kelley (Chris Klein) is about to graduate as the class valedictorian from a prestigious private college located near a working class suburb of Boston. Demonstrating ridiculously poor judgment on the eve of graduation, Chris goes for a wild joy ride in a brand new Mercedes, antagonizes local blue collar teen Jasper (Josh Hartnett), and makes a move for Jasper's long-time girlfriend Samantha (Leelee Sobieski). The evening ends with an old fashioned car chase and the two boys wreck the local (but fortunately empty) diner in an impressive fireball.

Kelley and Jasper get away with a light sentence that requires them to rebuild the diner, with Kelley forced to stay with Jasper's parents over the summer. The boys spend their days sneering at each other at the construction site, while Sam starts openly flirting with Kelley. They fall in love, but a devastating disease is waiting to dramatically enter the story.

Possibly one of the worst written movies to somehow receive respectable financing and a studio release, Here On Earth was scripted by Michael Seitzman and directed by Mark Piznarski with a reported $15 million budget. While some moments of adequate cinematography and lush scenery are pleasing to the eye, it is otherwise difficult to see how this turkey could have consumed millions in production dollars.

The black hole at the heart of the drama is a script devoid of any genuine emotion, sympathy or believable characters. Kelley and Samantha emerge as the romantic leads, and both are distinctly unlikable and incomprehensible characters, their on-screen behaviour totally inconsistent with their background. Kelley is supposed to be the class valedictorian yet spends the first 30 minutes of the film behaving like a total jerk, and then somehow he has to become the heart of the story. Seitzman throws in an oh-so-original stern dad and dead mom to justify Kelley's actions, and so he's not such a bad kid after all.

Meanwhile Samantha discards a life-long friendship with Jasper to chase after the kid who destroyed her family's business. Desperate to make his heroine more appealing, Seitzman hatches a serious ailment for the young lovers to contend with. They may be a dreadful couple, but they have tragic issues to deal with.

Klein, Hartnett and Sobieski read their lines with dead looks in their eyes, with Klein and Hartnett breaking out into shirtless macho fights at regular intervals. The supporting cast features actors who should know better than to appear as the parents of these kids, including Michael Rooker, Bruce Greenwood and Annette O'Toole.

Somehow in amongst the dross there are dreamy lines of dialogue about what heaven must be like. Never mind that, Here On Earth is cinematic hell, unearthed.